Hyphens and dashes

This is a hyphen: -
We use it in compounds like faint-hearted or pre-recorded. In German it is called Bindestrich or Viertelgeviertstrich.

This is an n-dash: –
It’s so called because it has the length of the letter n. In German they call it Halbgeviertstrich or simply Gedankenstrich, and it is used together with spaces to mark breaks in sentences. Wikipedia says (under “Halbgeviertstrich”):

In Appositionen, bei Parenthesen und erklärenden Einschüben – etwa in diesem Beispiel – kann der Gedankenstrich das Komma oder die Klammer als Satzzeichen ersetzen.

In English, the n-dash indicates spans such as time or page ranges, as in this example (from Wikipedia, under “n-dash”):

The French and Indian War (17541763) was fought in western Pennsylvania and along the present US-Canada border (Edwards, pp. 81101).

This is an m-dash: —
It’s so called because it has the length of the letter m. In German, they call it Geviertstrich, but it is rarely used. In English, the m-dash is regularly used, without spaces, where the n-dash (with spaces) is used in German:

the fire drillit was chaos

Got it?

1 thought on “Hyphens and dashes”

  1. I seem to see a lot of English-language publications that actually use the n-dash with spaces rather than the m-dash, as is conventional in German, so this seems to be acceptable (to some people at least) in the English-speaking world as well. What you shouldn’t do is confuse hyphen and dashes.

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